


Fools deal with Angels, Corpses deal with Devils

by cedi



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Angela "Mercy" Ziegler is an Angel, Deal with a Devil, Devil Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, F/F, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Loss, References to Depression, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-05-02 17:19:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14549547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cedi/pseuds/cedi
Summary: Lena lost the love of her life to a terrible accident, and with it went the hope for a better life. Unable to deal with the pain and her anger at the world that treated her so cruelly she turns towards the mystical arts in the hope to right some of the wrongs she has experienced. A path that brings her face to face with powers far beyond human comprehension.





	1. Chapter 1

The old, rusty sign above the shop’s entryway was barely illuminated by the single, dim lantern in the narrow alley. Because of that I had nearly missed it when I had first glanced down the narrow passage in my search for the secretive store. And even then I had only noticed it on my second walk down this street. Shadowmancer47’s directions had been just too damn vague! “Just go down the darkest alley you can find on that road.” She had written, really helpful if you asked me.

I shook my head in annoyance and focused back on the matter at hand, which in this case was the door before me. After all I had no time for introspection like that! Finding this place had taken me far longer than I had expected it would, all the other shops on the street had already closed and shuttered their storefronts, only the numerous seedy looking bars were still open for business.

I just hoped that this place really stayed open for the entire night, like shadow had told me.

And still I hesitated to knock on the heavy door. It had something forbidding about it, in fact it almost felt like the door was loath to even let me get this close; me touching it seemed quite out of the question for it.

I took an involuntary step back and studied the rest of the shop’s façade, hoping to see some kind of sign that would let me know that it was okay to ignore the feeling and enter the magic store. But my roaming gaze found nothing that put my fears and overactive imagination to rest, quite the contrary in fact. The bleak brick wall forming the shop’s outside was grimy and most of the plasterwork hiding the naked cinder blocks had flaked off a long time ago. In that respect this piece of real estate wasn’t any different than all the others in London’s bad neighbourhoods, the thing that made it different were the windows, or in this case the lack thereof.

However, it wasn’t like this building never had any in the first place, no, they had just been shoddily sealed off long after it had been first built. The places where the owners had placed their own, differently coloured bricks were starkly visible even in the dim light suffusing the gloomy alley.

I shuddered slightly and pulled my bomber jacket tighter around my chest.

I dithered a bit longer after seeing that, who wouldn’t? I mean for whatever reason would you decide to wall up all the windows like that, weren’t iron bars strong enough or what?

“What to do, what to do?” I wondered under my breath, while worrying my lower lip with my teeth. I could turn back around, leave this dark, dank murder alley far behind and go home to a cold, abandoned home. Where I would roll around in a bed bought for two, trying to catch the sleep that had eluded me for weeks now, only to wake up half an hour later drenched in cold sweat, screaming an unintelligent warning.

Or, I could risk my life on this fool’s errand for an unbelievable tiny sliver of hope to right the world.

I snorted, this hadn’t ever been a decision to begin with.

I straightened my back to bring the entirety of my slender frame to bear and stepped purposefully up to the black door. When I was only a little more than an arm’s length from the entrance the eerie feeling returned with a vengeance but this time I didn’t let it stop me and swiftly stepped all the way up to the heavy door. A quick scan of the entryway revealed no doorbell, so I was forced to politely rap my knuckles against the painted wood.

But my knocking had little effect, the door was far too thick for my knuckles to elicit any kind of hearable sound on either side. My fist had to do I decided and slammed it far more forcefully against the barrier blocking my way. Sadly, it had about the same result as my previous attempt.

I looked down at the old-school doorknob and bit my lip, I really, really didn’t want to just barge inside. I sighed unhappily. If someone would just come down the alley and enter the shop before me, then I could just slip in right behind them. But just as I had that thought a multitude of boisterous, clearly drunken shouts echoed down the alley from the street outside, startling me out of these hopeful daydreams.

Or maybe not, I thought instead and quickly went for the doorknob.

I really didn’t fancy meeting a bunch of drunken louts in a dark murder alley in one of the worst parts of London.

Luckily the knob turned easily and the heavy door swung inwards without as much as a whimper coming from its rustic hinges. For some reason I had really expected them to make some kind of horror movie sounds. I was almost disappointed.

The illumination in the short hallway beyond was far warmer and brighter than the single, flickering, retro-styled lantern outside the shop’s door. Together with the lovely dark brown wood panelling and the soft carpeting on the floor it worked wonders on my frayed nerves, and my gait regained some of its normal springiness with each step I took towards the room at the opposite end of the short hallway.

The space I stepped into a few seconds later was surprisingly big for such an old building, and surprisingly cluttered. Glittering trinkets and feathery things were stacked on every available surface, of which there were many. Countless little tables, ancient wooden benches and cupboards formed a labyrinthine network of paths leading all over the sales floor. And, as far as I could tell from my perch close to the entrance, not two pieces of furniture were the same. I stared at the eclectic collection with wonder. It must have taken years to gather all this stuff.

I slowly drifted towards the first of the tables in front of me. It displayed a wide assortment of wood pieces of different lengths and colours, each and every one of them sporting a yellowed tag tied to its end with a dirty piece of string. Careful not to disturb anything on show I leaned in closer to try to read the tiny, but meticulously text on the labels. But to my dismay all of them were written in some form of Arabic script, the whorls and squiggles telling me nothing of their secrets.

I sighed and straightened back out. I guessed I would have to find a store clerk to get my hands on the things I came here for. I looked around myself but so far no one had come forth to greet me, nor did I hear any footsteps. The silence was only broken by the rhythmic ticking of a small number of clocks hidden somewhere in the middle of the strange maze. I did another three-sixty, this time scanning the far walls for a till or obvious doorway to further rooms, but came up just as empty handed. Though that didn’t mean much, as some of the goods formed unstable looking towers that nearly touched the ceiling. Also… I’m rather short.

So I guessed the till had to be on the other side of the sales floor, obscured by one of towering mountains of mystical items.

I knew that the easiest way to find it would be to follow the walls, but that would also mean missing most of the displayed items. And while I was somewhat creeped out by the situation, my apprehension was not nearly enough for me to give up the opportunity to peruse more of the items on sale. So I slowly made my way into the elaborate maze of goods and trinkets, gaze jumping from one strange item to the next.

While walking down the rows of exotic items I subconsciously hunched in on myself. For some odd reason I felt like horrible things would happen to me if I so much as brushed against one of the curious items, which was silly of me, I know. After all, these items were on sale, right? They wouldn’t sell dangerous items, they wouldn’t be allowed to! I chuckled uneasily to myself and laid on a burst of speed to get past a row of milky crystal bottles, holding a murky substance, as fast as possible. I had been quite sure a red eye had been staring at me from one of them. I didn’t look twice to check.

After a few minutes of wandering the crisscrossing valleys I noticed something peculiar and stopped mid-step, one foot awkwardly hovering above the thick carpet. As far as I could tell the wall on the other side hadn’t come closer by any discernible amount. Maybe I had gotten turned around by the maze of paths, I wondered and looked over my shoulder in confusion, searching for the corridor that had led to this room.

For a moment I stared at the opposite wall in bewilderment, until a weak gasp of shock made its way past my lips as I realised what I was seeing.

The wall with the entrance was just as far away from me as the opposite wall. In fact, I realised after turning a complete circle, all of the four walls were equally as far away from me.

“What the fuck?” I whispered quietly and scratched the back of my head, brow furrowed. “How is this possible?” It shouldn't have been possible for me to reach the exact middle of the maze, considering the place I entered it, and the paths I took.

“Do you need help, missy?” I jumped in shock at croaking voice coming from behind me and flipped round in a hurry, almost falling over in the process. I had forgotten all about my awkward stance.

Somehow I managed to salvage my impromptu pirouette and came to a stop facing the stranger who had snuck up on me. My eyes were immediately drawn to the short …hag, now standing before me. Normally I wouldn’t dare to use a word like that to describe an old woman, but in this case there existed really no kinder word to properly describe the figure standing crookedly before me. The woman, or at least I was quite sure that she was one, wore an old, threadbare, black cloak with the cowl draped over her dirty, greyish shock of stringy hair.

I gasped in shock when I lowered my gaze from the cowl to her face and realised that only her left eye was intact. Her right one, instead of holding the same brown colour as the left one, was a ravaged, milky white orb with dreadful scars surrounding it. The bumpy scar tissue made it difficult to tell if she had the same strange tattoo surrounding that eye as she had on the other one.

I knew I was blatantly staring at the ghastly wound but I just couldn’t rip my gaze away from it.

“Missy?” The hag asked again, the single utterance sounding like the call of a mean spirited crow.

The sound of her rough voice was enough to momentarily distract me from staring at the remains of her grievous injury. Instead I tried to force a few words past the boulder suddenly blocking my throat. “I… I, ahh yes.” Not one of my brighter moments to be sure.

The old woman chuckled creepily, the noise sounding like two gravestones grating against each other. But even worse was the effect the quiet laugh had on her face as it turned her mouth into a grooved maw of jagged and crooked teeth and I shuddered at the whiff of horrible bad breath the outpouring of mirth had brought with it.

In comparison to this, the rest of her face with its bent nose and large warts looked rather mundane and innocuous.

The rest of her bony frame was clad in clothes that simply had to be stolen from the refuse of an old gypsy woman. The blouse and layered skirt were far too ugly and dirty to have been bought in this or even the last century. I cringed at the thought of how the crusty rags must feel against her skin.

The old crone ignored my stammered nonsense and stepped a bit closer, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Are you… looking… for something.” Somehow the old crone managed to make every single one of those helpful words sound like a horrifying threat. I think it had something to do with her sinister smile that had accompanied the slowly spoken words.

“Eh… Yea.” I answered, struggling to get my mind back on track after the fright the hag’s sudden appearance had given me. “I… I need to contact the Angel of Mercy.” I stuttered out.

The old hag let out a booming laugh at hearing my request, enveloping me in another cloud of horrible stench. “Silly girl!” She stated with a last croaked chuckle and a shake of her head. “Maybe you want to call upon the four riders of the apocalypse and Abbadon while you are at it?”

“Hey! I’m serious!” I said indignantly. My anger finally ousting the tremor from my voice. “She is the only one who can safe my love!” I fingered the medallion hanging around my neck, trying to get some much needed strength from it.

The crone eyed me strangely with her one remaining, brown orb. “Love you say? Wouldn’t you rather just buy a love potion?” She pulled a rose coloured vial from the depths of her shapeless cloak and held it up for me to see. “Everyone can be replaced. Trust me with that!”

Following the words she let out an ugly barking cough and spit some phlegm on the sleeve of her other arm. The display kept me from irately stepping up close to the woman. That and her smell.

“Not her!” I shouted furiously instead of getting all up in her business. “I. Need. To. Summon. Mercy!” I spelled out for her, squaring my shoulders in an attempt to look imposing.

“Summoning is dangerous.” The hag answered unimpressed by my weak display of righteous anger. “If you wish to learn, start with a pixy or a kobold.” The potion in her hand vanished back into the dark folds of her wrap and was replaced by a large Tupperware container holding an ugly, naked creature. I stared at it incredulously, I had never seen anything like it.

Originally, I had come here expecting to be swindled. Sure, I had come across some strange things and fantastic stories during my research on the internet, but I hadn’t really believed any of it. I mean real life magic? Come on. The best you are going to see is some Photoshop artistry.

This whole search had just been something to do, something to occupy my mind with and keep the horribly loneliness and sadness at bay.

But here, right in front of me was proof that magic was in fact real. No animal looked like a twisted, tiny human with leathery skin and a giant gaping maw of pointy teeth, of that I was sure. Nor had I ever seen something stare at me with such burning hatred. When I met its disconcerting gaze it suddenly fell into a demented frenzy and attacked the walls of its clear prison with its jagged claws. I cringed slightly at the sound the tortured plastic made.

“I already summoned many of those!” I said in an attempt to play over my probably very visible display of shock. “Don’t insult me.” I added for good measure, just to make it absolutely clear how experienced I was. Maybe I could make her believe that my expression had been one of offense, not surprise. Now if I just managed to take my eyes from the little monster I might even be convincing.

It was clear that my attempt at redirection had failed miserably when her thin lips twisted into a large grin, turning her face into an ugly mask fit to drive out evil spirits. “Silly girl! You haven’t summoned as much as a sprite.”

“How would you know?” I snapped haughtily.

The hag came a step closer and pointed a bony finger at her destroyed eye. “You lack the scars.” She laughed wickedly, spraying me with tiny drops of salvia. I grimaced in disgust, but didn’t step away from her like I reflexively wanted to. Now that I knew that there was a real chance to change my terrible fortune I wasn’t going to back down that easily.

We tried to stare each other down for a few short moments, to my surprise the shopkeeper gave in first.

“But I see that mere warnings won’t change your mind.”

She turned around, waved for me to follow her and hobbled in the direction I had been coming from. I took a last look around, my gaze skipping from one inexplicable item to the next, hopelessly lost. It was clear to me that I would never find what I was looking for in this mess, so I turned around and followed the old witch into the depths of her mysterious shop.

Or not.

Because only a few paces down the straight corridor formed by the wild assortment of tables and around a narrow bend found us on the periphery of the maze. I gaped in surprise at the room’s wall, which had suddenly sprung into being a bare two metres ahead of me. A quick glance into the direction we had come from showed that the opposite wall was still as far away as ever.

Something was very wrong with this room.

But my guide didn’t leave me any time to think this conundrum through before she shimmied off towards the little till that was cradled in the more distant of the two visible corners. Somehow I had to jog to catch up with the old woman, even though she had barely had a ten second head start on me and her gait was more of a shamble than a walk.

Upon reaching the till she pointed at the carpeted floor in front of it and order me to stay with another one of her croaked, gruff orders. I did as I was told and watched her vanish back into the mess of tables and cupboards, only to see her emerge from it seconds later a good twenty metres from where she had walked in.

I played uneasily with the cuff of my trusty jacket and wondered if it might have been wise to be a little bit more cordial towards the strange shopkeeper.

“Here.” The old woman said and dropped an oddly shaped piece of metal, a rolled up piece of paper and a tiny brown bottle on the table serving as the till. I leaned in close to examine the dropped items, uncomfortably aware of the hag’s looming presence.

The metallic piece turned out to be some sort of cheaply made medallion in the form of weirdly spiky wings cradling a large oval.

The shopkeeper tapped a finger against the scroll. “Paint the large circle on the floor with the tincture in the brown bottle. Draw the other ones on your body with the same mixture, as close to your heart, mind and hands as possible. Then step into the circle and wait there until all the symbols start to glow.” She picked up the medallion and held it up to my face, the light glinting brightly off the sharp wingtips. “Then make a fist around this tight enough to draw blood.”

She threw the item back onto the table and said nothing further, only staring at me in an entirely disconcerting way.

“Is this all?” I asked when the silence between us became too oppressive, about a mere two seconds later. The hag nodded, smiled darkly at me and held up two bony, long nailed fingers.

“A warning and an offering,” she said mysteriously, but continued her explanation before I had a chance to ask what she was on about. “You need to make an offering to the Angel of Mercy. The earthly value of the offered trinket does not matter, what matters is its attachment to you. The tighter your emotions bind it to you, the better.” She lowered one of her fingers, leaving one remaining.

“The warning:” she begun, “Only fools deal with angels!”

She grabbed my chin with her bony fingers, her dry skin felt like badly aged parchment, and forced me to stare into her remaining eye. I squeaked in protest and tried to move away but her grip held my chin in place with far more strength than such an old woman should possess.

“But only corpses deal with devils!” She stated with absolute certainty.

“Should the horned one appear, bend your knee, hand her the trinket without question nor wish and bid her to leave. Nothing good will come of her presence. And never try to contact her ever again, it’s always the same one answering a person’s call and she doesn’t like to have her leash yanked! Have I made myself clear?”

I nodded as best as I could with my head still painfully held in place by her bony, vice like fingers. “Yes ma’am!”

I had no idea where the ma’am had come from, but it felt appropriate in this situation.

“Good.” She said and let go of my face. Then she put the items into a tiny bag and handed it to me, the spitting image of a normal shopkeeper. “That will be five hundred pound sterling.”

I looked at her in shock and gulped hard. That was a lot of money, especially for my broke ass.

But for a chance to see my love again? It was nothing.

“I take cards,” The hag stated and heaved an ancient looking card reader from under the sales table. “And don’t worry,” she added with a vicious grin, “I doubt you’ll be needing it in the future. One way or the other.”

* * *

 

I returned to my flat in the very early hours of the morning, long before the sun was going to rise.

My home was nothing special. It was small and cramped, and not in the best neighbourhood. Though this part of the city was still leagues better than the one the magic shop was located in. Here you didn’t have to worry about stepping into discarded syringes, or getting robbed in the middle of the street... At least during the day.

I threw my jacket at the old hat stand next to the door, a move I had perfected in the years since my love had brought the ugly thing home and had restored it some. A memory that had always put a smile on my face in the past, but these days remembering her paint splattered shirt and proud smile gracing her face when she had presented the thing to me just hurt.

My eyes started to burn at the thought, the late hour had lowered my mental fortitude somewhat.

I shook my head angrily and pushed the mournful thoughts out of my mind. I would see her again, soon. I shook the bag in my hand a bit, to make sure that everything was still there and stepped out of my sneakers. She had hated them, thought them sloppy. I kicked them at the foot of the hat stand.

When I entered the small living room slash kitchen I successfully avoided the tall stack of takeout boxes, the only things I had eaten in the last month as cooking brought up… memories. I’ve burnt a lot of foodstuffs over the last weeks.

But while I had avoided the white, even-visible-in-near-dark cardboard boxes, I missed the discarded black sweater lying on the floor just beyond them. The change of footing caught me off guard and I stumbled hard. I barely managed to catch myself before I tumbled headfirst into the heavy, wooden dinner table.

I kicked the sweater irately into a corner. From the sounds coming from somewhere in the darkness I must have hit one of the heaps of discarded wrappers at the back of the room. Great, now I would have to clean up mouldy left-overs.

This place wasn’t normally this dirty. I mean, okay, I’m not the cleanest of persons at the best of times, but it had never reached this level of bad. She wouldn’t have let that happen.

The bag’s handles crinkled under my tightening grip.

I needed to do something about it, I thought and rubbed my tired eyes. She would have hated to see me like this, hardly eating anything, barely functioning and, I gave my armpits a quick sniff and immediately recoiled in disgust, stinking to the high heavens.

“But not today,” I told myself. I was way too exhausted to do anything but lay down. Especially since I planned to do the summoning ritual tomorrow. Originally I had planned to do it right after my shopping trip. But that had been hours before I’ve gotten lost in that shitty part of town, and before I found out that magic apparently was really real. Suddenly it seemed rather ill-advised to commune with unfathomable powers as sleep deprived as I was currently. So I shuffled tiredly into our… my bedroom. I dropped the small bag onto my cluttered desk, watching it for a second to make sure it wouldn’t slide of the heaps of papers and knickknacks, and then flopped on my bed with a powerful sigh on my lips.

For the first time in a month I fell asleep quickly, even before I managed to get my tight pants all the way off my legs.

 

“Ah, fuck. Damn it!” I screamed the next morning and rubbed my throbbing shoulder. I’ve never been a still sleeper, not like my girl who awoke each morning in the exact same spot as she had fallen asleep in. No, my body likes to move and doesn’t care that no mind is home to tell it how. When I had still shared my bed that had never been a big issue, it just meant that I normally moved all over the bed until I found my bed buddy and then clung to her like my life depended on it. A nice way to wake up, if you ask me, far better than a short fall on to a hard floor.

I sighed annoyed and sat up, ignoring the cold from the wooden floor seeping slowly through my thin panties and massaged my side some more. I just hoped that this wasn’t some kind of omen for how the rest of the day was going to go.

The sun was already up and cast bright, warm spots on the floor and the lower half of the bed through the tiny gaps in the closed blinds. I rose from my spot on the floor and made my way for the door. I still felt tired but even without the sun brightening the room going back to sleep would be unthinkable.

I didn’t bother taking a shower or changing my clothes. Sure I’ve worn them for a few days now, even slept in them, but I doubted that would matter to the Angel of Mercy. Hey! It might even set her in a more merciful mood.

But I did eat some left over pizza I was pretty sure was still good to eat. It was the safest choice for sure, the other stuff in the fridge had achieved sentience sometimes last week and the bread looked ready to crawl away should I try to touch it.

After my questionable breakfast I moved over to the dinner table and tried to shove it against the back wall. Moving the heavy thing took all the little strength my weakened body had to offer and I was nearly shaking by the end of it. But it was worth the effort as the smooth laminate floor would be perfect for the bit of painting I had to do.

After a quick break to get my breath back I retrieved one of my girl’s paintbrushes. Taking them from the battered and paint speckled tin case felt… wrong, sacrilegious, like I was disturbing a sacred altar.

Back in the living room I knelt on the hard floor, ignored the pain in my knees and broke the real-life wax seal on the tiny, brown bottle the hag had sold me. Visible, white fumes wafted from the opened bottle and swiftly mixed with the air in the room. The acridic stench made it difficult to breathe and my eyes immediately started to burn and itch. I grimaced in disgust and got back on my feet to get the old spray paint mask from the art supplies.

Somewhat protected from the gag-inducing fumes I returned to my chosen workplace and unfurled the scrolls the old hag had given me. I sighed in relief when I saw the symbols I had to paint. They were pretty crude and reminded me a lot of the runes I had come across during my internet research. I was pretty sure I could paint them accurately even with my low artistic skill.

“I’m sorry!” I whispered to the empty room when I dipped the brush into the acidic substance in the bottle. I was quite certain that whatever this stuff was it would ruin the bristles completely.

I drew the first line on the floor with the white stuff and recoiled in shock when the substance began to sizzle.

How the fuck was I going to put that shit on my body, I wondered worriedly.

I decided that I would deal with that problem once I finished the rune on the floor and continued drawing.

When the shopkeeper had told me that I would need to draw a circle I had imagined a solid line, maybe with some runes around and inside of it. But in reality it was more of a circle created by numerous interlocking ‘L’s, which I was quite happy with. Painting this was much easier than trying to paint a neat, round circle.

It was about when I reached the halfway point of the circle that I noticed something strange; it was getting easier to paint the symbols. Not in a “You got used to the movements” kind of way, no, it almost felt like my hand was pulled imperceptibly to the right spots on the floor.

With this added assistance I finished the circle quickly and stepped out of it to verify that everything looked like it should. After twenty minutes of going over every single symbol I had drawn I was very sure that I had gotten everything right and put the paper to the side.

I peeled of my shirt, it stuck slightly to my back, and threw it to the side, leaving me only clad in a pair of grimy pants and the sports bra covering my modest bust. I shivered slightly, it had gotten noticeably colder in the room since I had started painting. Which was kind of strange as I was quiet sure that the thermostat wasn’t running. I glanced over at the control panel near the entrance and wondered if I should do something about the cold. With a shake of my head I decided not to bother. It would take the old heating system a long time to warm the room. I glanced at the slightly smoking brush resting on the table, and I had a feeling I’d be hot soon enough.

With shaking hands I put some more of the white paint on the end of the blackened brush and held it up to my chest. I planned to leave the hands for last as I felt like putting a mystical acid on my body was hard enough by itself, there was really no need to add burning and cramping hands to the mix.

I drew the first rune with a quick flick of my hands.

“Ahhh!” I screamed loud enough for my neighbours to call the police thinking someone was getting murdered. My skin had started to burn the moment it had made contact with the brush. Only slightly at first, but within the blink of an eye the soft, painful glow had turned into a firestorm against my skin. And it wasn’t just the burning pain tormenting me, my skin also tightened in a feeling reminiscent of mud drying on the skin. And just like with drying mud my skin also started to itch horribly. I required all of my fleeting willpower to stop myself from wiping the burning solution off with my hand.

Instead I balled them into fists and gritted my teeth, trying to wait the burning pain out. But even after an entire minute it showed no sign of lessening.

Through teary eyes I glanced at the piece of paper on the table in front of me and wondered how I would ever be able to draw the other five symbols on my body. One was already far more than I could handle.

But I couldn’t give up now. How could I continue on knowing that I could have saved the love of my life but chickened out because of a bit of pain? I squared my shoulder and hovered the brush over my chest, to the left of the still smoking rune.

I managed to draw symbol two and three with only the occasional gasp and shriek of pain and was already preparing to put number four on my forehead when a thought struck me.

This was going to disfigure me. I liked my hair styled into a short, spiky mess that would never cover the scars this stuff was surely going to leave.

I heard the old hag’s words echo in my ears. “You lack the scars!” She had said with an evil grin. Not for long, I thought with a grim smile.

“To hell and back for you, my love.” I whispered, wiped off the single tear trailing down my face and put the smoking brush to work. My shriek of pain was deafening.

By the time I had finished my right hand I was breathing harder than a woman in labour. I felt like I was going to suffocate under the mask protecting my airways. I clawed it off my face in a panic and flung it into a random direction. I didn’t even notice the stench of burning flesh and acid hanging in the air. My breathing slowed some.

I doubted that I could grip anything with my shaking left hand, especially not the thin, rod like handle of the paintbrush. So I put the damned thing between my teeth and drew the last wedge shape like that, doing most of the movements with my, until now, unmarred right hand.

Once finished I spit the smoking paintbrush out and sagged to the floor. Before I had started this ordeal I had thought the worst thing would be drawing blood with the medallion. I choked out a sad chuckle and crawled for the circle, winged medallion in hand.

Inside, I flopped to the ground and rolled onto my back, hoping against all hope that I wouldn’t have to wait for long. I whimpered softly. With my kind of luck I would have to wait till nightfall.

I was somewhere between waking and sleep when I heard the ringing of the doorbell. At first I thought it was a fantasy born from the pain ravaging my body but it persisted even after I regained some clarity and it didn’t stop for a few minutes after.

When it stopped it was replaced by the jingles of keys.

My eyes flew open. “Shit!” I croaked out. The buildings caretaker! The police! They were going to take me from here. “I can’t do this again!” I cried quietly, my eyes tearing up once again.

Luckily I had forgotten to pull the key from the lock when I had locked it the night before. Their keys wouldn’t fit in.

“Miss Oxton can you hear me!” Shouted a male voice. Not the caretaker. “Miss Oxton!”

Something hammered against the wooden door from the other side. They would try to break through, I realised.

“Hurry up!” I said and turned my head to the runes on the ground with a pleading look. “Oh.”

They were glowing with a soft white light.

A swift check revealed that the marks on my hands and chest were doing the same. I used the medallion as a cloudy mirror to check my forehead, which too was glowing.

How long had they been doing that, I wondered. Hours maybe, there was no way to tell.

I got up on my knees and gripped the medallion as hard as I could. Only the blood dripping from my closed fingers showed me that I had successfully pierced my skin. The pain it had caused drowned out by the inferno raging on the back of my hand.

I watched the blood drip onto the light brown floor and reflect the light from the sun beaming through the kitchen window. I smiled lightly, she would have loved to draw this image, she always loved the play of the sun.

My gaze was pulled up by the air warping in front of me. It waved like the hot air above a scorching hot road on a warm summer day, only a lot stronger. Without a warning the air in front of me broke apart. As if the cloth of reality had been violently torn asunder by a force standing behind it.

A chaotic mess of colours and… things replaced my view of the boring wall. I tried to make out whatever the things on the other side were but was brought low by a sudden throbbing pain in the back of my head. It lessened the moment I stopped looking at the tear in reality.

Therefore I missed how she stepped out of the ragged portal.

But I didn’t miss her soft hand cupping the top of my head, or how all of my excruciating pain left me at her touch.

“There, there.” She said in a sultry voice entirely unbefitting an angel.

I looked up at her and froze. The woman standing above me was incredibly beautiful. No that word didn’t do her justice. She was… astonishing, perfect and magnificent in a horrible, cruel way.

Her glinting black horns crowned her regal head like a priceless diadem. Her ruby red eyes put the shiniest of their namesake jewels to shame and her blood red lips held a promise of ecstasy far beyond anything a mortal drug might offer. And her touch… Her barely there touch on the back of my head gave me more comfort than I’ve ever felt.

She smiled at me like a cat would at a mouse, granting me a long look at her sharp teeth. And even though a vampire would be jealous of her pearly whites they only served to enhance her predatory beauty.

“Isn’t that better.” Her fingers trailed out of my short mop of hair and caressed along my cheek towards my chin. I leaned unwittingly into her touch.

The demoness used a single finger to put a slight upwards pressure to my chin. I rose to my feet, compelled by her fluttering touch and was completely unable to offer even a sliver of resistance. She smirked at me knowingly, the curl of her lips doing unspeakable things to my insides.

“You’re a quiet one.” She purred quietly, “how novel.”

I was unable to tell if her words were meant in derision or as praise.

“Nowadays summoners always blather on without pause. The magicians of old would be sooo scandalised. Pretty rude of them, wouldn’t you agree?” I nodded even though I was unsure who she was talking about. Or maybe the demoness did the nodding for me with the single finger still caressing my chin, I couldn’t tell too engrossed by her tantalising voice.

“Ah, I like you already,” She said and chuckled softly, “But I doubt you called me all across the Veil of Shadows just for some idle chitchat, no?”

The image of my girl appeared before my inner eye and gave me some much needed strength to resist the temptress’ effect on me. “Eh… Yes!” I stuttered, “I wish to ask you for a boon, oh great one.” I had read on the internet that beings like her enjoyed stilted talk like that. Something about their age and traditions… I hadn’t paid too much attention to those articles, however, and remembered only little of them in my befuddled state.

The flawless woman before me laughed cheerily. “A boon? You don’t say. I’d never expected a bold request like that from a little mouse like you.” She did an elegant wave with her hand and continued, “But please do tell.”

“I… ah, that is…” I was unsure of how to formulate my request. It had been so easy and clear a few hours ago, but under her intense, ancient gaze all the prepared thoughts and phrases had left me. I scratched the back of my head awkwardly. “I want to go back in time!” I finally blurted out.

She looked at me with a cute, thoughtful expression. “Time travel, hmm?” She hummed. “Khronos won’t like that. Not at all.”

Her words had me worried. I had settled on time travel because all the resources on the net had warned me about trying to revive a loved one. Every single website had been on the same page on that one, every. Single. One. When did two random websites ever agree with each other, let alone all of them? So I had decided to heed their advice, as apparently revivals like that always went bad. Either because the wish was taken too literally and the person came back as a half decayed zombie or because their soul had suffered from the trip into the afterlife and back, leaving them shadows of their former selves.

Saving her before she died seemed like the best approach.

After a few seconds of silence her eyes snapped back to me. “What are you offering?” She asked seriously, all of the playfulness had left her perfect features.

I held up the pendant resting around my neck with my bloody hand. My grandmother had given that to me. It had been hers for the longest time, gifted to her by her husband on their wedding day. She had entrusted it to me shortly before she died, as a reminder that I was loved and cherished by my family, even though my parents had an extremely difficult time showing it.

The heirloom had been with me ever since, but even though it meant the world to me I was more than willing to give it up. What was a bit of metal compared to a life? I was sure that my grandmother would approve. Though probably not of the deal with the devil

Mercy scrutinised it carefully for a moment, and then gave it a quick lick of her sensuous tongue. She moved her mouth as if she were tasting priceless wine at a five star restaurant.

“Pain, hope, pride, compassion.” She listed, as if they were ingredients to a fine drink, “A bridge to the beyond and such sweet suffering.” She moaned with a delighted expression.

“This could buy you riches beyond your imagination,” I grinned happily, “Or a night of pleasure to die for.” She added suggestively, a tiny smirk gracing her beautiful face. “But sadly, it won’t buy you even a day’s worth of rewound time.”

“It won’t?” I asked, looking at her in dismay. I owned nothing more precious to me than that.

The demoness nodded grimly. “I’m not going to risk incurring divine wrath for a bauble. I need something way more precious for that.” She tapped a slender finger against her chin as if she was lost deep in her thoughts. “Like… hmm,” She snapped her fingers and looked down on me with a predatory grin. “Like your soul.”

“My soul?” I asked, my voice sounding unsure to my ears. Though honestly I shouldn’t have been surprised. Since when weren’t demons out for human souls?

She hummed in agreement and offered a beatific smile. “I’ll give you fifty years to enjoy your powers over time. Once that time is over, or when you grow tired of them, you belong to me. Mind.” She tapped a red painted fingernail against my forehead, “Body.” Another tap, but this time on my chest. “And soul.”

“What does that mean exactly?” I asked cautiously.

She leaned in close to my ear, caressing it with her soft, warm breath. “It means that you are going to be my pet, my lovely plaything.” I whimpered slightly.

Without a warning her head surged forward like a striking viper, her needle-like teeth piercing the lobe of my ear with ease. The flesh and cartilage offering no more resistance than soft butter. I screamed in pain and flinched away from her.

Luckily for me the demoness had let go of my tender flesh immediately or otherwise I would have shredded my ear with the strong jerk. I shielded my injured ear with my hands, feeling warm blood drip freely on the insides of them and flow down my wrists.

Mercy visibly relished the taste of my blood, even going as far as licking the little splatters of blood from her lips.

“And that you are going to scream for me.” She continued her earlier thought. “Mostly in pain. But if you are a good little pet your sweet little screams will be born of ecstasy, every once in a while.” She said the last part like a mother promising a treat to a child. I shuddered at the image.

Could I really agree to that, I wondered. If all went according to plan I would undo my lover’s death, and then all of this shouldn’t happen, right? But what if time travel didn’t work like that, what if the deal was somehow still intact. Fifty years aren’t a lot compared to eternity. I massaged my temples trying to get my thoughts to move less sluggishly. This entire thing had taken a lot out of me.

“Fifty years are a lot.” The demoness said. She must have seen an indication of my indecision on my face. “You’ll be seventy, seventy five by then. Your best years long behind you and little to look forward to. But until then you’ll be living like a goddess. And you won’t even have to die at the end. Doesn’t that sound nice?” She asked her full lips puckering seductively. “Do we have a deal?” She held a dainty hand out for me to take.

I watched it warily for a few moments, a small voice at the back of my head warning me not to do this. But the voice was weak and tired swiftly.

I had to try, even if it might cost me everything in the long run. I took her hand haltingly.

At my touch her small smile turned into a nightmarish grimace of teeth and burning, red eyes.

“A deal is struck!” She screeched loudly, no trace of her earlier melodic voice remaining.

Before I could react to the horrific display her open hand struck my chest with the force of a racing freight train. The impact forced all the air from my lungs and flung me backwards at the speed of a bullet.

“Enjoy your wish!” She called after me, but as loud as she had said that I still barely heard the mad demoness’ cackled words over the sound of the wind in my ears.

I braced myself for a vicious impact on the back wall, which to my surprise never came. Instead of splattering against the hard stone I just sailed through it and fell towards the asphalt below. But even the solid earth parted for my fall and ushered me into a bottomless, completely black tunnel. I tried to scream but no air was left in my aching lungs and so I entered the void in complete silence.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Contains graphic depictions of violence, self-inflicted and otherwise.

Moments later I found myself in a truly alien place. The world around me was a disturbing riot of blacks and dark hues of a kind I had never seen before. And although I was pretty sure that there was nothing to be found in the space around me, the darkness seemed to pulse and writhe in on itself as if it was a living, breathing being and not simply the absence of everything.

But to my relieve only the space further from me behaved in this disturbing way, everything within reaching distance was just normal, empty space and the writhing mass of things seemed to shy away from me every time I moved a limb, as if they were afraid of my touch.

 

Since I apparently wasn’t in any immediate danger from the darkness I concentrated on other things instead, like on the question if I was still moving. Because thus far I couldn’t really tell as I was completely weightless since I had appeared in this odd place.

From what I could tell my perspective hadn’t changed so far which admittedly wasn't solid proof for anything much considering the only things I saw was darkness and the odd taupe colored nebula dancing solitarily in the void.

 

I tried to roll over to get a better look at things but without anything to exert force upon my wild flailing arms had no effect on my orientation nor did the contortions of the rest of my body.

Even though my thoughts were still somewhat muddled from my earlier encounter I realized the futility of my spastic motions quickly enough and stopped. 

Since there was nothing I could do that would change my current situation I simply relaxed, waiting for something to break the calm monotony of this place, though even so I still kept a wary eye on my surroundings, just in case the writhing things became curious about the intruder into their home.

 

By the time something in my surroundings finally did change I had regained most of my wits and was just about done considering the stupidity of my actions and how much of it had come from my own stupid self and how much had heralded from whatever evil spell the demon had cast over me. 

I was actually pretty glad about the distraction from my current train of thoughts, as so far my considerations hadn’t favoured my own intelligence. This hadn’t been the only stupidly rash decision I have ever made, not by a long shot.

Anyways, the thing that had caught my attention and had pulled me away from my brooding thoughts was a sudden bright light illuminating me from somewhere behind me. I tried to take a look at it but some devilish power had put it in the exact middle of my blindspot. All the contortions and twisting in the world proved fruitless since I ran into the same difficulties as bevor, as in I was unable to reposition myself by even a tiny amount.

I twisted my neck like mad, and even though I channeled my best owl impression ever, I was still unable to catch more than a tiny glimpse of the source from the corner of my eye.

I cried out in frustration.

Then a second time out of fear.

Because while I was unable to hear the sounds I made, as I had somewhat expected from the absolute silence that permeated this place, I was able to see them. The space in front of my face had warped at my scream not unlike the surface of a pond after you toss a heavy stone into it.

The waves bridged the distance between me and writhing darkness in barely any time at all, and when the first wave impacted one of these shadowy tentacles their ponderous movement turned frantic. Before I could make up my mind if this was a bad thing or a really bad thing the world turned into an out of control roundabout and I was flung brutally backwards towards the waiting light. Due to the sudden, erratic movement of my body and the world surrounding me I was now finally able to see what caused the bright light. I stared at it with wide eyes unsure what to make of it. 

Whatever it was it looked a lot like a tiny star to me which I reasoned was probably bad for me, burning heat and all that. 

At least it did for a second. Because seconds later what had been a tiny pin prick of light in a sea of darkness had turned into a door sized hole that was so immensely bright that my eyes teared up immediately. Yeah, I was probably fucked, I thought.

Somehow I managed to keep my eyes from closing completely on me for just long enough to deduce that I would hit the insanely bright circle smack dab in the middle and that there was something bluish waiting in there, then my eyes had finally enough of the searing light and shut closed, darkness enveloped me.

I was quite sure that the circle was some kind of portal out of this world, considering the way it had appeared and how foreign it looked in this place. Also, it was probably plenty big for my lithe frame to pass through unscathed, but I still assumed a fetal position, just in case my eyes had played tricks on me.

 

When I finally touched the surface of the portal a heavy gasp was wrenched from between my lips. There had been some kind of invisible membrane spanning over the hole in space that I had apparently pierced through on my way out. The impact against it had been really painful and had felt an awful lot like that one badly timed dive from the ten meters diving board from my childhood.

But even though my body hurt all over a somewhat happy smile appeared on my face, at least I had heard the gasp. Hopefully this meant that the portal had led me back into the real world.

 

Opening my burning eyes took me a few attempts and a lot of willpower, each attempt only revealing short glimpses of the space around me before my eyelids came crashing down. These short snapshots of the world around me revealed a canvas that was mostly painted in blues and whites, telling me little more than the glances snatched from outside the portal.  

When I finally managed to keep them open for more than a second I paused in confusion at what I was seeing as the view before me made no sense to me. Half of my vision was still filled with a soft blue that reached from one horizon to the other while the second half was filled with a splotchy, pockmarked white.

I had the oddest feeling that I had seen something like this before.

“Oh shit!” I whispered as the realisation of what I was staring at hit me. Followed by a far louder “Fucking shit!” a heartbeat later.

It was the fucking sky, seen from the completely wrong side for someone who wasn’t comfortably sitting in a nice, modern airplane.

This time I didn’t even try to do something besides panicking.

 

I fell for an astonishingly long time, which gave me plenty of opportunity to consider a few things that I might have missed if the fall was shorter. Like for one thing why I wasn’t freezing. The air this high up must be well into the negative degrees; I should have already turned into a human popsicle. But so far I hadn’t felt as much as a chill going down my back, in fact I felt warmer than I had at home.

The second thing that irritated me was the wind’s very atypical behavior. At the time I was considering this I had already been falling for minutes, so I was pretty sure that I should have reached terminal velocity by now and still I barely felt any kind of airflow around me.

And thirdly I wondered if I had suffered brain damage somewhere along the road. Maybe even before anything happened to my love. In fact maybe it was actually me who had the accident and I was lying comatose in some bland hospital room somewhere with my girl bawling her eyes out in the seat next to me. Really, this seemed far likelier than the whole demon who punched me into the stratosphere shit that I had going on here.

 

Anyway, once I had thrown of the last vestiges of the panic that had gripped me and debated all of these random questions in my head I calmed down and came to enjoy the fall. I had always liked flying. As a matter of fact I had planned to attend flying lessons, I had even started saving some cash for it but something had always come in between…

 

A few minutes later I eventually broke through the thick layer of rain-swollen clouds, clothes soaked by condensation. When the last vestiges of cloudy mist were pulled aside I cried out in surprise. Not because the ground looming bellow me was in any way unexpected, but because it was a lot closer than I had thought it would be. The clouds must have been hanging really low over the massive, grey city below me. 

To my pride it took me barely anytime at all to recognize the urban jungle of jagged stone teeth below me. The Tower of London, the river Thames and the Tower Bridge were just way to distinct landmarks.

“Cool!” I said sarcastically. At least I would pancake on the streets of my hometown. At least something I guess. And the tabloids would have something to write about. British girl falling from skies was probably going to cause quite the ruckus.

I tried my best to be a bit more worried about my impending death but the whole ordeal so far had kinda left me emotionally exhausted. At least now I would get to see my love again. I mean if there are demons and angels then surely there is some kind of afterlife?

 

The impact was absolutely brutal and at the same time I didn’t feel a thing of it. As in there was zero pain. The moment I had touched the ground I had simply stopped moving. So far everything had gone as expected.

 

I sat up and looked owlishly at the solid ground beneath me. After a few quick breaths I took a few moments to check myself all over for injuries. 

I couldn’t thind as much as a broken nail. I was perfectly fine. If you disregarded the powerful shaking of my knees. 

I pulled myself to my feet with the help of a nearby street lamp and inspected the road I had landed in.

The tall gray apartment buildings lining the road held little familiarity to me, nor did the few shops lining the street on their ground floors. The buildings were to tall for me to see any of London’s many iconic landmarks so I decided to head over to the intersection at the end of the residential street to look for a road sign.

Finding one was easy enough and while I didn’t know the name of the smaller road, the sign for the crossroad made my heart miss a beat. 

“Priory Road” I whispered silently. This was where she died.

Could it be, I wondered and scanned the crossing a second time, this time paying careful attention to the details and the few people out walking the sidewalks. 

A stretch down the road I saw a flash of a familiar jacket and hair through the window of a parked car.

“Yes!” I shouted, one arm pumping the air, and went immediately for a mad dash down the main road. Every single one of my quick strides hammering the same words through my mind. “I can save her!”

After a few meters I could see the person walking ahead of me more clearly and my silent prayers were answered. It really was her! I laid on another burst of speed which I didn’t knew I had in me and closed the distance between us rapidly.

I was already imagining our happy reunion when I realised that she had turned to her left while I was distracted by happy thoughts and was about to squeeze between two parked cars.

 

“No!” I gasped past my burning lungs. This couldn’t happen again! I wouldn’t let it.

I came to an abrupt halt which sent me nearly to the ground, but I managed to get a hold of the side mirror of a parked car just in time. I allowed myself a single breath before I shouted loudly trying to get her attention.

“Stop!” 

I wanted to say more, way more, but all my further words were stifled by a quick succession of wracking coughs that made my bones rattle. The stinging pain lancing through my chest nearly toppled me over.

When I managed to force myself to straighten back out it was already too late. She mustn’t have heard me over the noisy street. All I was left to do with was watching her walk into the street.

 

Everything after that happened exactly like the police reports had described it. She missed the pimped out car careening around the corner further down the road. To absorbed by something on her phone. By the time she heard it over the load music playing in her headphones it was already far too late.

The impact took barely a second but to me everything happened in slow-motion. I saw how the fender hit her just below her hips and propelled her up over the carbon fiber hood of the car. The demonic decal gracing the hood grinning evilly up at her, its powerful red arms spread like the arms of a lover as if it was preparing to catch her. But no soft landing awaited her.

I noticed how her phone spiraled out of her hand, a final last dance before it shattered on the dirty road. And I also noticed how her beautiful hair turned into a fan of molten gold even though there was barely any sun to be seen on this dreary day.

But all of this was nothing to the horror that was the grimace of pain and shock that graced her face for a split second before she impacted the tinted windshield of the tricked-out car.

 

Suddenly time came rushing back with a vengeance and everything further happened with unnatural speed. Still I saw the very moment when her neck twisted in an unnatural angle, a last makabre snapshot that stayed for me for the rest of my life. Then her body was thrown of over the roof of the car to come to a rolling stop in the middle of the hard road like the carelessly discarded toy of a raving mad girl.

 

The hand bracing me against the parked car slowly slipped of the shiny black surface and I collapsed to my knees just as the race car came to a screeching halt a good twenty meters down the road. Though it didn’t stay there for long. A second or so later the overpowered engine of the death machine gave a roar and launched the car down the road, far away from the carnaged it had wrought.

He’d make it home scot-free, that I knew from the police reports. They hadn’t found the guy in the weeks following the hit and run even though his car was so unique.

 

I don’t know how long I was kneeling there, empty gaze focused on a random spot on the sidewalk. It was only the wailing of sirens that brought me out of my stupor and back on my feet. I didn’t wait for the ambulance and police cars to turn the corner. Instead I just turned my back on the bloody scene and started to run. Where to I didn’t know. I just knew that I couldn’t stay here in this godforsaken street any longer.

My legs carried me tirelessly down the road. This time my traitorous body showed no strain, no tiredness, only an unrelenting desire to move and I put no stop to its desires.

When I finally slowed down to a trott it felt like I had run for days. 

So my surroundings came as quite a surprise to me once I caught my breath and looked around. Because I found myself back at the exactly same spot as I had started from. Somehow I must have run in a giant circle.

But even stranger than that was that the street in front of me was completely devoid of emergency responders. Hell even the broken shards of glass were missing from the road. I scratched my head, did I actually run for hours, it had certainly felt like it, but still?

I stepped past the cars parked on the curbside and into the road, giving the road’s surface a closer inspection. But this search too yielded little proof of what had happened here some time ago. There were no fragments of glass, no broken electronics, not even the slightest bloodstain.

 

I leaned against the black car behind me deeply confused with my mind racing like mad. Though if asked I couldn’t even guess at what had been running through my mind then, maybe nothing at all.

 

A few moments later I heard the roaring of a powerful engine coming down the road and at the same time I also heard faint footsteps echoing from behind me. I turned around just in time to see my love step in between the cars I was leaning against. Her body free of any sign of injuries as if the accident never happened. 

A sudden increase in noise from down the road pulled my focus away from my girl for the blink of an eye, revealing a muscle car with a devil decal drifting around the corner further down the road.

“Oh god!” I said, as the realisation struck me. My demonic time travel powers must have inadvertently brought me back to before the accident had happened.

My gaze snapped back to the love of my live approaching from the other side of the car. Her gorgeous eyes were still focused entirely on the phone in her hands. In fact she was so distracted by whatever she was reading that she didn’t even notice me standing within reaching distance of her, nor my exclamation from earlier. 

We really had to talk about her inattention once I saved her.

I didn’t hesitate any longer than that and flung my arm out to push her back towards the sidewalk. I’m sure she would forgive me a broken phone and some scratches.

 

To my horror my hand didn’t push her back, instead it sunk into her chest well past my wrist as if she was just a mirage, a play of light without solid form. I was left there standing in place and gaping alternately at her and my obscured hand in shock as she proceeded to first walk through the rest of my arm and then the left side of my body. Not blinking as much as an eye all the while.

I knew then that I had fucked up. The Angel of Mercy had fulfilled my wish, just not in the way I had expected.

I sighed tiredly and turned around. There was really only one thing left to do. I lunged forwards towards the middle of the road, nearly to the exact same spot as my girlfriend was standing in. When my shoulder passed through her lower back I mourned the fact that I wouldn’t get to embrace her for one last time. 

Then my thoughts were cut short by the overpowered metal behemoth crashing into me.

 

Due to my desperate lunge I was a lot lower off the ground then my girl and so the bumper hit me head on with the power of a racing freight train. My body was flung a good twenty, thirty meters down the road and rolled head over heel for another good five meters until it came to an abrupt stop against a street lamp.

Everything hurt, and at the same time nothing did. The pain lighting up my nerves felt false, like a phantom, a memory of pain long past. 

Nothing but my heart was broken, and the only real thing I felt was the burning of tears staining my face and slowly dripping to the cold, rough curbstone pressed against my cheek.

I kept lying there silently crying, completely ignored by the running masses and the emergency responders like the ghost I was. 

 

My tears didn’t stop when night fell over the city of London, nor when the moon rose over this facsimile of my home. No, I was broken. Done. Exhausted on a fundamental level.

 

So I didn’t notice when the stars above my head went out one by one. I didn’t hear the hollow sounds of her high heels. The first I noticed of her presence was her soft touch against my exposed cheek. A caress offering such warmth that my head inadvertently moved into her cupped hand to absorb more of it.

It took me far too long to realise what this meant, and when I finally did I snapped my head back faster than a striking snake. I crushed my head into the edge of the curbstone below me but gave little attention to the echo of pain blossoming in the back of my head. Now that I knew it for what it was the pain was easy to ignore.

 

“What do you want, bitch?” I snapped at her in a voice hoarse from crying.

“Tsk, such a dirty mouth,” The demoness tutted, “We’ll have to work on that.” She tapped my head with the toe of her impossibly high heels and added. “Come on little one, look at me when I’m talking to you. You were such a good pet when you first called me. Don’t play the brat now!”

I spit at her boot and kept my eyes closed. This time I wouldn’t fall for her dirty tricks and mind games.

Mercy sighed sadly, sounding exactly like a disappointed mother. “I guess some rebellion was to be expected.”

For the next while no one spoke which was perfectly fine with me. After all I certainly didn’t hurt for time, and if she hadn’t anything better to do than stare haughtily at me all the better. That just meant that there wasn’t another poor soul getting ripped off. 

 

Though after a while she managed to get on my nerves then while she didn’t speak another word she never let me forget her presence. Sometimes it would be the sound of old parchment getting rubbed against each other and other times it was the scratching of a single heel over the road surface. Still, I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of an answer, if I could help it.

 

Surprisingly enough she gave in first. “So are you already this bored by your new powers? It has barely been two days!” She asked in an amused tone of voice. 

What great powers they are, I thought, angrily grinding my gritted teeth. 

“You know,” She continued in a conversational way, “You don’t have to stay here for the entire fifty years. We can move on to the payment portion of our contract at anytime.”

 

“Fuck you!” I cried with all the power of my small lungs. “You gave me jack shit! I’m not going to give you a second of my time.” Originally I had planned to stay silent until she was tired of this “conversation” and leave, but her last comment had been to much for my frayed nerves. So instead I opted for throwing expletives at her. Oh, well.

 

She tutted again. “Oh, I promise you that you will pay in full. We made a magically binding contract.” I heard the sound of parchment again and felt her closing in. “Here, see?” She said, her voice dripping of glee. “One eternal servitude for fifty years of powers over time.”

My eyes stayed closed. I might not be a lawyer but in my opinion that piece of shit wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

“No you didn’t.” I countered and waved my hand around. “I can’t control time, I can’t change anything. I’m just a freaking observer in this horribly bad show that is my life.”

Mercy gave a derisive chuckle in return. “Just because you don’t know how to work something doesn’t mean it’s broken. Hell I even added power over space, free of charge.”

 

For the first time since she had arrived I opened my eyes and gazed at her beautiful face. I shuddered slightly at the burning red of her irises.

“Are you telling me that I can change the past if I only know how to work my powers?”

The demoness gave me an evil, toothy smile. “Well… no,” She admitted without shame. “Changing even a tiny thing of the past would call Kronos down on my ass faster than a shipload of pirates who haven’t seen a woman in months.” 

I fully intended to say something about what the aforementioned crew of sailors could do to her when she shushed me with a single elegant finger.

“But,” She continued uninterrupted, “You can go to any moment and place in time you want, isn’t that great?”

“No,” I deadpanned, “It isn’t.”

“Well then maybe you shouldn’t have sold your soul for it.” The devilish woman stated gloatingly.

 

I kept silent and just spit at her again. What else could I do… My angry words only worked to amuse her.

“Well, I see you aren’t quite there yet.” Mercy said to no one in particular. She turned around as if to walk away but then stopped for a moment and explained smugly. “But you’ll get there. I guess another ten years of this,” She waved her hand in the general direction of the accident, “Will change your mind and work wonders on your attitude.” She started walking again. 

“Well, it will be ten years for you. For me in the real world it will be barely a second.” She said as a parting shot. “If you want to stay here for the full fifty real world years be my guest. But those fifty years will feel like a really, really long time in here!” She waved at me from the edge of her portal and added, “See you in ten years! Tudulu!”

The last of her farewell was barely intelligible over the demon’s mad peel of laughter as she stepped into the portal and vanished.

 

Her sinister laugh echoed down the deserted street for a long time after she had vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally the story was meant to end here, a cautionary tale of what happens if you make a deal with the devil. But I decided early on that I would continue it and give it an end that is a bit happier than this.


	3. Chapter 3

I remained there on the cold pavement for a long time, doing little more than watching the futile struggle between night and day play out on the sky above me in a zen like state of mind. This calm was something rather unknown to me as I had always struggled with centering myself and calming down, even though my girlfriend had repeatedly tried to teach me how to go about it.

I’m sure she had been a good teacher and it hadn’t been her fault that I’ve never learnt the art. Staying still had just always felt wrong to me; Why in the world would I just watch the day go by when there were so many things I could do with the time slowly dripping by?

But now in this hellish nightmare I was imprisoned in it had come with surprising ease. I guess having nothing to do while simultaneously having all the time in the world will do that for you. Furthermore feeling neither thirst nor tiredness nor any other of the body’s normal daily ills helped me a lot with maintaining my meditative state.

In fact the only thing that had ever endangered my calm introspection was the brutal crash happening a few meters away from me every time the sun had once more conquered the dark sky.

But I never turned my head to watch nor did I listen on purpose to the carnage taking place behind me. Without any concentration invested the sounds and screams merged into an ever repeating, meaningless mess, just a further feature of the moebius loop that was my existence.

An Existence that I, funnily enough, didn’t mind as much anymore. The unending exposure to the crash had taken a lot if its horror. I mean how could it shock me anymore if it repeated ad nauseum a few short meters away from me, like a sad commercial advocating for safe driving?

Or maybe it hadn’t lost any of its horror and it just couldn’t pierce the barrier of calm around my mind anymore. One way or the other it didn’t really matter to me anymore. Nothing much did.

So it was quite unsurprising that I didn’t notice the change straight away.

I only noticed it after my six, seven hundredths day here, when a vague sense of disquiet managed to stir my thoughts. My mind awakened sluggishly, unwillingly as if I had been hibernating instead of just meditating. But after a good few hours my thoughts moved somewhat again, though they still flowed as if they were stuck in molasses.

Now that I was somewhat lucid again I searched my mind for the thing that had irritated me and brought me back to this dreary existence. It wasn’t apparent at first as I mistook it for the beating of my own heart, only when I realized that it was somehow “hearing” it from all around me at once did I put more of my limited focus on this strange phenomena pressing down on me from all directions, even from my insides.

I was unsure if it was actually a sound, a very strong vibration as I had first thought. As in all honesty it felt a lot more like the feeling before a really heavy rainstorm when all the hairs on your skin rise in anticipation of the first lightning strike.

To test this I put my hands over my ears and listened to it.

The impression of it remained just as strong as before. So it probably wasn’t a noise.

Accurately describing the feeling was hard, even to myself, the english language just didn't seem to provide the fitting words. But if I were forced to put it into words I would say that it felt like pressure, but not. Or that it was like the after image left in your eyes after you stare at a bright spot for too long.

But I guess the most accurate way to describe it would be to say that it felt like the ebb and flow of blood beneath the skin, something you only notice when you concentrate on the feeling.

And even though I had no idea what it was, meant or where it came from it didn’t scare me. Quite to the contrary, listening to it actually worked to calm me. The ebb and flow of pressure felt a lot like the beating of indescribably large heart just beneath the skin of the world. A heart that would continue beating calmly long after I was gone from this horrid place, unfazed by the tiny lives of the creatures living on its skin.

I dropped my hands back to the ground, no longer covering my ears and “listened” to the regular beat of the heart. I rejoiced time and time again in the swell of pressure as it climbed towards an unreachable climax only to deflate in sympathy when the pressure dropped long before it reached its peak. The regularity and predictability of it was just as comforting as the exchange between sun and moon had been. Though unlike the before this newfound source of entertainment never let me drift of into the near deathlike state again. Maybe it was because I subconsciously knew that this beating heart had the capacity to change, unlike the path of the stars. So far, it just hadn’t chosen to do so.

Over many days the pulsing of the heart became easier and easier for me to hear, as if my body somehow had understood my yearning for it and had evolved in accordance.

In the end I felt it so strongly that I was sure that the heart had taken on physical form and was hovering invisibly just a few centimeters above my head.

Following a foolish impulse I extended my arm, hand open and finger splayed as much as they could as if I were feeling for something in the dark.

To my utter surprise my searching fingers found something.

I eyes flew open instantly, then blinked rapidly to get my vision to clear up. I had taken to keep my eyes closed a long time ago when I first felt the world’s heartbeat. It had made it easier to listen to.

To say I was confused by what I saw above me would be an understatement as I had never seen the like of it before.

It was as if water and light had coalesced around my fingers becoming one in their desire to touch me. The closest thing in appearance to the blue mist wafting around and above my fingers that I knew of were probably the northern lights. Just with a myriad of different shades of blues instead of green and yellow.

The mist above me formed a long, frayed, softly pulsing ribbon that stretched from one side of my field of view to the other. Just above me, where my fingers had probably made tentative contact with it, the beautiful blue ribbon was slightly damaged. Some of its matter must have clung to my fingers when I had wrenched them back out of shock at the unexpected feeling of something soft against my bare skin.

Though from what I could see the damage was already healing as new mist flowed into the gaping wound I had created, sealing it completely. With the worry that I had broken something irreparably put to rest I turned my attention towards my finger and the blue glowing mist that still clung to them unerringly.

“What the...!” I gasped, my voice weak from disuse. Now that I was looking closely at my fingers I noticed that the mist didn’t just cling to me, but that it actually diffused into me, as if my skin wasn’t actually there.

The mist didn’t just vanish at contact with my skin but instead moved into it, illuminating it briefly from within, as if I was holding a powerful blue light against the other side of my flesh. And what was even more disconcerting was that the blue glow followed my veins down the arm for a short distance.

With panic widened eyes I waved my hand wildly through the air in an attempt to dislodge the rest of the blue corona adorning my fingers, but the quick movements just served to accelerate the process and within seconds all of it had merged with my flailing arm.

To my limited relieve the glow subsided quickly and long before it reached my shoulder.

Still, I didn't trust that observation alone and so I spent the next few minutes mentally checking myself all over. But even then I couldn’t find anything that felt different to before I had touched the hovering veil.

After I finished my careful examination I suddenly remembered that there was still a lot of the stuff floating just an arm’s length away from me. I nearly jumped to my feet in panic but managed to get myself back under control just in time to prevent that stupid move. Instead I held my breath, crossed my fingers and glanced fearfully up at the blue veil, afraid that it would jump me the moment I laid my eyes on it.

Moments later I released my breath in relieve, the ribbon hadn’t changed anything about its slowly, randomly meandering behavior. Apparently the blue stuff hadn’t developed a sudden taste for one Lena Oxton.

Very slowly I crawled from under it, taking great care in keeping as much distance to it as possible, even if that meant pulling my back along the rough and dirty pavement. Once clear of the strange stuff I stood up and, for the first time in years, looked at more than the small section of sky just above me.

“Oh god!” I cried loudly. There were ribbons everywhere. Dozens of them pierced through the bland exterior walls of the apartment buildings lining the street and even more of them crisscrossed high up in the sky. I turned around to check behind me and saw the exact same thing, the pulsing ribbons where everywhere.

After my first moment of fear passed I noticed something peculiar about these ribbons. The ones high up in the sky were scattered pretty much randomly or maybe I just couldn’t see the pattern they followed. Meanwhile most of the ones close to ground led towards the vicinity of the eternal accident and lost all cohesion there, forming a soft blue mist above the street.

I approached the fringe of the blue glow carefully, stopping just outside the blurry offshots and observed it anxiously, trembling legs ready to fly into action at the slightest change.

After a few minutes I cocked my head in confusion.

The frequency of the bright blue pulses racing down the ribbons was slowing down and with it most of the mist wafting through the street before me vanished. With the psychedelic mist gone I was in a prime location to watch the ribbons move back into themselves, looking a lot like roots growing rapidly in reverse.

“No, not roots…” I whispered to myself while watching the spectacle. “Veins!”

I swiveled my head from one knot of veins to the next, growing ever surer of my conclusion. The bands were truly veins pumping some strange substance from one place in this strange world to the next. Maybe they were even powered by the immense heartbeat I had felt.

I stared at them with eyes wide with wonder.

But if they were really connected to the heart then that meant that they couldn’t be evil, right? The heart had felt powerful, all encompassing, uncaring, but never evil.

I moved my hand before my eyes, twisting and turning it, so that I could study it from all directions. But just like before I found no lingering evidence of the blue mist I had absorbed. I dropped my hand back to my side and returned my questioning gaze back to the middle of the street.

“Maybe…” I whispered but then continued in my head. Maybe this was a way to change something about this ever repeating hell. I started walking towards one of the closer and larger veins bisecting the street but stopped nearly immediately.

But what if it wasn’t good? I wondered. What would this substance do to me? Or if I got the attention of something larger would it be happy to be interrupted by little old me?

I took a quick glance at the middle of the road and grunted angrily. It wasn’t like I had anything left to lose anymore.

So a few seconds later I ploded into the middle of the largest vein with braced shoulders and a determined expression on my face, ready for anything.

At first nothing much happened. The mist was slightly cool to the touch but nothing a Londoner wasn’t used to and flowed mostly around me, as if I were a stone in the middle of a brook. Then, a few seconds later a first brave eddy touched the unprotected skin of my arms. It clung to it for a moment and then vanished into my warm flesh like a snowflake at the beginning of winter. But its absence didn’t go unnoticed by the rest of the stream and soon after large, cloudlike structures clung to every bit of my body and turned my vision blue.

My skin consumed the blue stuff in immense, greedy gulps as if it was a desert and the blue light the long desired rain.

The feeling of it was… interesting. Not bad exactly and not nearly as cold as I had expected. In fact it was rather exhilarating. The slight cooling effect was refreshing like the first rain after a long drought and made my nerves thrumm with energy.

Never in my life had I felt this awake. I rejoiced in the feeling, stretching my body as much as I could, aware of every las millimeter of it.

“Ahhhh!” I screamed all of the sudden. From one second to the next the thrumming in my bones and nerves had risen exponentially. Gone was the electrifying current that elevated my mind to new heights and instead a powerful burning pressure took its place, a pressure that threatened to rip me to shreds and one that caused pain realer and deeper than anything I had ever felt.

With a second loud yell I gathered all the little strength left in my tormented legs and threw myself out of the vein, or at least tried to. But instead of propelling me out of this burning hell my muscles refused to follow my commands and remained brutally cramped as if someone had connected a powerful current to them, which they kinda had, I guess.

Luckily for me not every single muscle in my body suffered from the same problem and a few of them attempted loyally to follow my command. While this didn’t result in the heroic leap I had imagined the movement was enough for me to topple over and mostly out of the stream of distilled suffering, only my legs remained partially stuck in the pumping vein.

With the last of my strength I managed to claw myself completely free from the streams excruciating embrace and of to the side of the road, where I promptly collapsed my vision filling with an inky darkness. I welcomed it gladly as it meant a temporary relieve from the pain still wracking my small body.

The sun was just about to rise when I opened my eyes the next time. Which in this place wasn’t much of an indicator of how much time had passed while I was out. Ever looping day and all that.

Without any way to tell the time I pulled myself to my knees and leaned against the cold car at my back. The small move was surprisingly hard to pull of as many of my muscles still twitched occasionally, throwing my well rehearsed moves into disarray. Apparently my body still wasn’t free of the torturous influence of that damned blue stuff.

But after a felt eternity I finally managed to prop myself against the side of the parked car. I sighed deeply in relief.

Afterwards I took stock of my current situation. My body didn’t seem to badly hurt, if you ignored the occasional tremor still wracking it, and neither was my head to badly off. There was only a slight feeling of pressure and a kind of acute burning at the back of my head from where it had made crushing contact with the pavement, though that pain was easily ignored.

All in all I had fared way better than I could have ever hoped to.

With that taken care of I rested my eyes some more, waiting for the last of the symptoms to subside.

A few hours later I was awoken from my well deserved rest by the loud roaring of a powerful engine coming from down the street.

“Not again,” I groaned and flung my hand out as if to shoo away a fly. I was so damn tired of this shit. Couldn’t Mercy torment me with something else for a change? I mean she’s an ancient being, she should have tons of creative ways to torture me. Like throwing me into…

I suddenly stopped short and cocked my head.

Where was the screaming?

Slowly I opened my eyes and looked bewildered at the scene in front of me. The car, my girl, literally everything was frozen in place.

“What the fuck?” I asked quietly.

I waited for a moment with bated breath, which I released slowly after nothing changed in the tableau before me for a few moments. Without averting my eyes from the strange scene I blindly felt for my backrest’s mirror or door handle to pull myself up on my still shaky legs. My fingers found the obvious outcropping of the mirror first and I used it to slowly pull myself to my feet. After I was sure that I was at least somewhat steady I took a first careful step towards the massive car standing frozen in the middle of the road.

I stopped hardly a step away from the metal beast with one arm outstretched, hand barely a centimeter from the painted front hood. I didn’t dare touching it.

I remained there for quite a while, hovering very close to the car but never laying a finger on its shiny outside. The entire time I kept my gaze tightly focused on the car and its heavily tinted windows, unwilling to risk catching even the tiniest glimpse of my girlfriend standing frozen mid-step just on this side of the parked cars. Seeing her like that would be just too surreal, too painful and I was unsure if I could tear myself away from that view uninjured.

Finally, after a long while I took a sudden step back from the car and lifted my hand in simulacrum of my actions after I was so rudely woken up.

Because by now I was sure that I had caused this freeze of time. Sometimes during the staring contest with the car’s modern headlights and the mist glinting before them I had come to the conclusion that this was the power the Demon of Mercy had gifted me with. It only made sense, after all she herself had told me that I just didn’t know how to work it. Though why I could do so now remained a mystery to me.

I had considered that it was because of me stepping into that hellish vein earlier. At first it had sounded reasonable: Me gaining control over my abilities after touching a strange, alien vein that was probably a direct connection to purgatory. But then I realised that the weirdness had actually started long before that, when I had first felt the strange pressure under the skin of the world. And before that there hadn’t been anything off about the routine, as far as I could tell.

Anyways, the how of it didn’t really matter to me nor the why. All I knew was that this might be a way to escape my purgatory, to break this endless cycle of the worst day of my life.

There was only one way to find out.

I braced my shoulders and raised my arm, palm open and facing up, watching my surroundings expectantly.

Nothing happened.

But that didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to give up this quickly.

I shook my head to get rid of the doubts creeping through the dark rafters of my mind and tried to get my concentration back.

“Okay, not the gesture,” I told myself. So it had probably been the intend. My thoughts had been quite muddled at that time so I couldn’t be sure, but I was quite certain that I had wanted it to stop, that I had willed it to stop. So I tried that path for my next attempt.

“Reverse!” I commanded with my eyes squeezed shut in concentration, “Reverse, reverse, reverse…” I chained my orders to the world into a rapid mantra into which I pushed every last drop of my will.

At first I thought it was another failed attempt, but then I heard it: The sound of a powerful engine slowed down to the extreme. Buoyed by this small success I chanted my order even harder, focusing with everything in me on my one, powerful desire to rewind this shit show.

And just like that it did.

Slowly at first, as if the world was an ancient, rusty steam engine. But with every one of my spoken commands it took on more and more steam until the world around me flickered past at a dizzying speed.

With a final shouted “Reverse!” I let go of my concentration and watched the world rush by. The cars racing up and down the street were barely visible anymore, moving far faster than anything else I had ever seen. Hell, even the passers-by were moving so fast that I was unable to recognize them before they vanished around a corner or into one of the apartments.

I spun around myself like a spinning top, arms out and laughing like mad, fitting perfectly into the rest of this riot of colors and movements.

 

I had done it! I had forced my will onto this shitty world and brought it to heel.

 

After a few more quick rotations I came to a stop and promptly fell to my knees. But the tiny spark of pain that caused didn’t manage to pierce the shell of my good mood. Instead I just bounced back to my feet and prepared myself for my next feat.

Mercy wanted for this to be my hell, I was going to make it my heaven!

I extended my hand with a theatralic flourish, even going so far as to bow to my rapidly changing viewership, and then spoke a single, powerful command fueled by my new found conviction.

“Stop!”

And the world came to an instant halt.

I paused for a short moment, suddenly unsure of what my next step would be. Because of my uncontrolled rewind I had no idea when I was and how far I would have to go back to reach the point of time I had met my loving girlfriend for the first time. But apparently the world didn’t care for my indecision as it suddenly warped around me in a very unpalatable way. Honestly, I could have lived without ever seeing the world turn inside out, because that conundrum had my head hurting somewhat fiercely. Though the impossibility of a cube flipping inside out was quickly forgotten once I realised where the twisting space had deposited me to.

I was standing just outside my favourite cafe in the entire world: The Ecopoint.

Without pause I pushed open the glass door and stepped into my home away from home. Unsurprisingly the decor and the people were exactly as it had been then, on the day I had met that beautiful girl for the first time.

The comfortable, brown easy chairs were still scattered in small groups between the immensely tall bookshelves filled with near endless rows of books that were free to be read by all patrons. The clientele were mostly students from the nearby Imperial University of London sitting together in small groups discussing random topics or working on some important papers in the seats close by the window, with large mugs of strong, cheap coffee for company.

 

“Hey there Lena, good to see you!”

I jumped nearly into the rafters in surprise at hearing someone address me and quickly turned around. I didn’t think anyone could see me or react to me. I was pretty sure that this was a recording, right?

The mystery was resolved quickly as I realised that it was just Lori, the barista, greeting the Lena of the past who had just stepped through the doors.

Seeing myself felt weird, like watching a bad recording someone had made of me in secret.

“Hi Lori.” Former me greeted the woman behind the counter, adding a timid wave for good measure.

Man, I had forgotten what a scaredy cat I had been then, always afraid of someone attacking me out of the blue, always keeping to the background. Though I guess I had good reason for it back then.

I hadn’t been a near permanent fixture in this place because of my love for coffee, no. I had come here because Lori didn’t care how long I was staying even though I barely spent any money.

Looking back she probably knew that this was my only sanctuary... Besides my grandma’s home.

Occasionally the kind barista even gave my a piece of cake for free. Always telling me that she would throw it away if I wouldn’t take it since it was too old to sell. It had been the only way for her to give me something for free without me rejecting it.

I watched myself move past the counter and sit down into the lonesome armchair in the darkest corner of the shop where I unpacked my homework.

I found myself unwilling to skip this bit and fast forward. Somehow it felt right to watch the entire journey of this day. So I moved over to my younger self and sat down into the red, leather padded window seat just behind the armchair, settling in for a long wait.

While I watched myself work I took stock of the many, barely visible red spots that I tried to hide behind the long sleeves and drooping waistline of my jumper. Young Lena didn’t do a very good job of it though. Which was fair enough I guess as she couldn’t have known that someone was watching her or otherwise she would have taken greater care.

I sighed in pity for my younger self at the large number I counted. I had forgotten how plentiful they had been at certain times.

 

By the time Lena of old was ready to leave the sun had already entered the last part of its journey down the horizon and barely any light reached past the tall buildings into the coffee shop, which was far from empty even at this late hour.

I had been ready to leave a good hour ago, ever since the color of the sun had taken on this peculiar golden hue announcing the end of this warm summer’s day.

I followed myself over to the door giddy with anticipation of this day’s life altering event.

 

“Goodnight Lori,” My younger self called out with one hand in the air, the other on the door.

“Goodnight Lena,” The older woman shouted back in between fulfilling orders of caffeine starved students. “Get home safely!” She added, but by then my past self had already pushed the door open and stepped out.

“Yes!” I shouted and lunged for the door. In a few more seconds my younger self would hurry around the corner and crash into a poor girl by the name of… I didn’t get to finish my thoughts as I was suddenly flung back into the cafe by an unseen force.

“What the fuck!” I cried out and raced back to my feet. If I didn’t hurry I would miss it!

I approached the door again, this time quite a bit slower and with outstretched hands. Therefore I had plenty of forewarning about the stretchy film spanning the entirety of the doorframe as if it were a trampoline.

I punched it and was nearly rewarded with a fist full of face for my troubles.

I shouted a bunch of angry, unintelligible exclamation and rushed the barrier with full force, stretching it to the breaking point a good meter outside of the entrance.

I would not be denied so close to the finish line!

Sadly the world was of a different opinion and sent everything to hell.

 

The space around me ripped open as if the fabric of space was torn asunder, ripping the floor right out from under my feet. Without its help in the fight against the barrier I was quickly overwhelmed and sent flying head over heel into the portal opening behind me like a beast’s voracious maw.

The trip through the riot of colors that formed the portal was quick, so quick that I lost barely any speed at all. Which meant that I came flying out of it at the speed of a cannonball right onto the rough stone surface of a long road, a road that I knew all too well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story getting lighter might have been a lie for this chapter, but the next one is a bit kinder for sure. At least I hope so.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally planned as a two-shot but after a walk through the city I realised that I could extend it much further and offer a chance at a better end for Lena. If I've got the time and there is interest I might do so.


End file.
